Further Reading

Remind, a company that offers both free and paid communication services for teachers and other users, declared victory today. That's a big change from two weeks ago, when Remind said it would have to stop supporting text message notifications on the Verizon network for users of the free Remind service.

At the time, Verizon said the fee was necessary to fund spam-blocking services. But Verizon relented after getting complaints directly from Remind's users, who said their texts are not spam.

"Your voices have been heard," Remind CEO Brian Grey wrote today. "I'm thrilled to announce that, thanks entirely to you, we have heard from Verizon that they don't have plans to change the fee structure applicable to Remind for SMS messaging. This means we will no longer be forced to shut off text notifications for Verizon Wireless customers using Remind. There will be no service disruptions for Verizon Wireless customers."

Last week, Verizon said it would waive the fee for K-12 users. But Remind complained at the time that Verizon still intended to charge the fee for preschools, day-care centers, youth sports coaches, and other non-K-12 users of the free Remind service.

Grey's statement today seems to indicate that Verizon ultimately decided not to charge the fee for any texts sent over Remind's service. A Remind spokesperson, when contacted by Ars today, said that there are "no new fees" being charged by Verizon.

Remind's now-averted shutoff of texts over the Verizon network would have taken effect on January 28.

Other companies benefit too

Verizon's decision not to charge the fee will also apply to similar companies.

"We are keeping the service exactly the way it has been for Remind and other companies like it that deliver free communications to these important users," Verizon said yesterday. "We understand how important this service is to our customers and we're committed to ensuring that a free messaging option remains available now and going forward."

Remind sends 1.6 billion text messages a year on the Verizon network, according to Verizon. The new fee would have been $0.0025 per message, according to Twilio, a technology platform that Remind and other companies use to send text messages.

Remind's costs for sending messages to Verizon customers would have increased from a few hundred thousand dollars to several million dollars per year, Remind said two weeks ago, before Verizon's decision to change course.

Remind says it has 30 million users, most of whom rely on the free version of the service.

Remind has been facing a similar situation in Canada, where Bell and Rogers also announced new fees. Remind today said that Bell has decided not to charge the fee, allowing Remind to continue service on the Bell network. "Unfortunately, text notifications will still be ending on Monday, January 28 for anyone with Rogers Canada or its subsidiaries," Remind said.

It is probably best that we include a specific Verizon fee if you want to receive text messages and are on their service. Of course, now that we are including a fee, we cannot reasonably do that for cents, as we also need to pay a CC processor, and you are not our direct client.

The entirely predictable consequence is that we are going to up the charge substantially, and our clients will in turn up the fee as well, so you end up with a dollar or so for this specific service if you want the ability to receive text messages, and are using Verizon. For now, at least... monetizable services tend to seek their maximum price.

The painful part is that nobody is going to give up that revenue even if they stop, once it starts, and it is going to be tempting to apply the fees to everyone, Verizon or not. Text messages are either basically free, or they are not, but if they are not, you will end up bearing that cost twice, nobody is going to eat it for you, your service is just more expensive with some hidden costs.

So isn't a central aspect of SPAM that it is 'unsolicited' ? If you sign up for the service, and you ASK them to send you texts, how is what they are doing in any way SPAM?

Just because you send out something (texts, emails) in high volume does not make you a spammer.. not if people explicitly asked for you to send you those things.

Why is this so hard for Verizon to understand? (must be because it doesn't end in "moar profit for Verizon", that must be it)

From Verizon's perspective, they just receive a ton of text messages via Twilio and may have no way to confirm whether those messages were requested or unsolicited. Remind may be good about this, but they are not the only company using Twilio. And Twilio is not the only company that sends texts. So it's possible Verizon could do some kind of screening to distinguish solicited text messages (like those sent by Remind) from other text messages that are unsolicited.

That said, I didn't see anything in the coverage or Verizon's statements to suggest they do that or that they were increasing their spending on that. So I agree with you it was probably just a cash grab. Because Verizon.

So isn't a central aspect of SPAM that it is 'unsolicited' ? If you sign up for the service, and you ASK them to send you texts, how is what they are doing in any way SPAM?

Just because you send out something (texts, emails) in high volume does not make you a spammer.. not if people explicitly asked for you to send you those things.

Why is this so hard for Verizon to understand? (must be because it doesn't end in "moar profit for Verizon", that must be it)

"Remind sends 1.6 billion text messages a year on the Verizon network," .. why is it so hard for you to understand this "service" is being exploited for spam? How in the blue fuck is 1.6 billion messages a year even considered reasonable? Oh, because they used the term "teachers" in the headline. That's the spin - put "civil servants" in the title to fit a political agenda.

This is just like the headline for "fire fighters" using fucking 100 gigs in a month. The headline should have been "Firefighters used their data to download video game and endangered civilian lives".

There are about 76 million students in the US. So 1.6 billion text messages is about 20 text messages per student per year. Add in parents as additional recipients, and non-school applications mentioned in the article like community groups and youth sports, and the number of text messages sent per student is quite reasonable.

So isn't a central aspect of SPAM that it is 'unsolicited' ? If you sign up for the service, and you ASK them to send you texts, how is what they are doing in any way SPAM?

Just because you send out something (texts, emails) in high volume does not make you a spammer.. not if people explicitly asked for you to send you those things.

Why is this so hard for Verizon to understand? (must be because it doesn't end in "moar profit for Verizon", that must be it)

"Remind sends 1.6 billion text messages a year on the Verizon network," .. why is it so hard for you to understand this "service" is being exploited for spam? How in the blue fuck is 1.6 billion messages a year even considered reasonable? Oh, because they used the term "teachers" in the headline. That's the spin - put "civil servants" in the title to fit a political agenda.

This is just like the headline for "fire fighters" using fucking 100 gigs in a month. The headline should have been "Firefighters used their data to download video game and endangered civilian lives".

There are about 76 million students in the US. So 1.6 billion text messages is about 20 text messages per student per year. Add in parents as additional recipients, and non-school applications mentioned in the article like community groups and youth sports, and the number of text messages sent per student is quite reasonable.

My kid's teacher sends no less than 4 messages a day everyday of the week. I'd quit but once or twice a week the message is actually important. They don't send messages home to parents on paper, its use Remind or be in the dark.

So isn't a central aspect of SPAM that it is 'unsolicited' ? If you sign up for the service, and you ASK them to send you texts, how is what they are doing in any way SPAM?

Just because you send out something (texts, emails) in high volume does not make you a spammer.. not if people explicitly asked for you to send you those things.

Why is this so hard for Verizon to understand? (must be because it doesn't end in "moar profit for Verizon", that must be it)

"Remind sends 1.6 billion text messages a year on the Verizon network," .. why is it so hard for you to understand this "service" is being exploited for spam? How in the blue fuck is 1.6 billion messages a year even considered reasonable? Oh, because they used the term "teachers" in the headline. That's the spin - put "civil servants" in the title to fit a political agenda.

This is just like the headline for "fire fighters" using fucking 100 gigs in a month. The headline should have been "Firefighters used their data to download video game and endangered civilian lives".

You say 1.6 billion as if it's a really big number that would be hard to get to legitimately. Lets do some math and find out.

There are 56 million kids in the US in grades k-12, most have about 6 classes per dayIf this service serves 15% of those kids, and sends just a single message regarding a single class per school day, over a 40 week school year, it's over 1.68 Billion messages.

56,000,000 x 0.15 x 5 x 40 = 1,680,000,000

That's just based on k12 age students, not counting any in college etc. That doesn't count any other potential customers. That presumes only a single phone is messaged (not a student + 1 or 2 parents) Yes 15% is a generous number, yes their penetration isn't likely that high yet, but it's only looking at one type of customer they have.

The point is that it's not that hard to get to 1.6B texts a year sending stuff JUST to students

high volume does not automatically mean it's spam. Now if you can show me hoards of people complaining about spam texts which can be positively attributed to these guys, I'll buy they are spammers.

IMHO this is just a wireless carrier trying to figure out how they can go back to being paid for text messages that are essentially free for the carrier to send. They look at those 1.6B txts and think, oh if we just had a penny for each....

I am genuinely confused as to why Remind, which is a for-profit business, gets to use other companies services free of charge. If Remind were a non-profit I could, maybe, see an argument that they shouldn't incur certain costs but they aren't a non-profit.

The original article clarified that Remind already pays for the text messages. Verizon was going to add another fee that would increase Remind's cost by an order of magnitude.

From the original article. "To offer our text-messaging service free of charge, Remind has always paid for each text that users receive or send," Remind said in a notice to users. "Now, Verizon is charging Remind an additional fee intended for companies that send spam over its network."

Netflix pays for bandwidth, customer pays for bandwidth, but broadband company wants more money so they discriminate.

Remind pays to send texts, customer pays to receive unlimited texts, but carrier wants more money so they discriminate.

Verizon has spam-blocking services? The amount of text spam I get on my Verizon phone would seem to argue to the contrary.

Those are coming from paying spammers.

Q: When is Spam ≠ Spam?A: When spammers pay Verizon to classify their "Spam" as "≠ Spam"

It's much like the difference between "annoyingly detestable customer advertising" that Verizon is paid to distribute to everyoneAND"highly targeted customer-focused advertising" that Verizon insists customers love and benefit from;that Verizon is paid more to distribute to everyone;and for which Verizon absconds with your Personal Information and proceeds to sell to anyone!

Otherwise: Fees!

Spoiler: show

(With Many Thanks to The Pythons!)

(Oh, what the heck; Fees4all! ... because we really need to up our game to Phama-scale percentage-increase benchmarks ...)

I dropped Verizon as a carrier, for moral reasons, about three years ago. Couldn't be happier. I pay less, get better service, and am not supporting the greediest, most obviously evil company on the planet.

Say what you want about Comcast, they've never used natural disasters to try to extort money out of first responders.

I dropped Verizon as a carrier, for moral reasons, about three years ago. Couldn't be happier. I pay less, get better service, and am not supporting the greediest, most obviously evil company on the planet.

I can't stand them but I also can't get reliable service at my house with other providers. They really do have the best network in many places and they [ab]use that to their advantage.

Verizon has spam-blocking services? The amount of text spam I get on my Verizon phone would seem to argue to the contrary.

The AT&T one you could download on iOS was really good. Call Protect or something.

Nowadays you can get third party ones, Apple added an API for them and permissions in settings.

I am using RoboKiller on TMobile. It is ok, but real sluggish at noticing that a recent call came in. Correction, it really sucks. No reports for 3 days even though there were a dozen goddamned Sierra Club calls and some more random ones.

Dear Beelzebub in Tartarus, do I have to go back to AT&T just for decent spam blocking? It ain't right.

I am genuinely confused as to why Remind, which is a for-profit business, gets to use other companies services free of charge. If Remind were a non-profit I could, maybe, see an argument that they shouldn't incur certain costs but they aren't a non-profit.

I can’t believe the amount of downvotes you are getting. Apparently it’s okay to demand free service from an SMS carrier because.... think of the children? Or what?

Maybe it has something to do with the context? You know, schools being horrifically underfunded in the US, then one of the biggest telecoms in the world comes after an important service they use for what amounts to nothing on their bottom line?

It's not like it costs anything to deliver SMS messages. They're transported in what was previously free space in the control channel. Exactly the same amount of bandwidth gets used no matter how many SMS messages get sent. And the person getting the SMS is already paying for the service (effectively with infinite markup, since the marginal cost to Verizon is exactly $0.00 per message), so Verizon is just trying to get paid twice.

I am genuinely confused as to why Remind, which is a for-profit business, gets to use other companies services free of charge. If Remind were a non-profit I could, maybe, see an argument that they shouldn't incur certain costs but they aren't a non-profit.

I can’t believe the amount of downvotes you are getting. Apparently it’s okay to demand free service from an SMS carrier because.... think of the children? Or what?

SMS messages realistically cost a negligible amount. There are months I send over 1000. You make it seem like no one is getting paid here. The teachers and school district already pay for their service, the students and parents already pay for theirs, and the service that it is built on is already paying someone to be able to send SMS out. Verizon isn't happy with the volume of messages sent out or so they say, but realistically they want to be paid directly for the sms messages sent so were imposing a "tax" or fee to attempt to get money out of the company.

I dropped Verizon as a carrier, for moral reasons, about three years ago. Couldn't be happier. I pay less, get better service, and am not supporting the greediest, most obviously evil company on the planet.

Say what you want about Comcast, they've never used natural disasters to try to extort money out of first responders.

They don't send messages home to parents on paper, its use Remind or be in the dark.

well what do you think little billy or little suzy would do with that paper?

Shove it up your ass?

Edit: Its important to teach kids responsibility. Often we fail when we are learning and there is nothing wrong with failure. Sometimes failing is the best way to learn. So when little billy/suzy shoves that paper up your ass instead of bringing it home then we are going to talk about responsibility. When we take kids out of the loop and do not expect them to be responsible then we are doing them a disservice.

Verizon has spam-blocking services? The amount of text spam I get on my Verizon phone would seem to argue to the contrary.

The AT&T one you could download on iOS was really good. Call Protect or something.

Nowadays you can get third party ones, Apple added an API for them and permissions in settings.

I am using RoboKiller on TMobile. It is ok, but real sluggish at noticing that a recent call came in. Correction, it really sucks. No reports for 3 days even though there were a dozen goddamned Sierra Club calls and some more random ones.

Dear Beelzebub in Tartarus, do I have to go back to AT&T just for decent spam blocking? It ain't right.

Dial #ONI# (#664#) on t-mobile to enable their scam ID and #ONB# (#662#) for their scam block stuff. T-mobile rolled out their own and it works fairly well most of the time.

What's always missing in these scenarios is that culprit (who tried to get away with it) never actually apologizes or publicly disciplines the responsible executives or similar. Corporate America really needs an honor code. The one from historic Japan would do nicely.

I am genuinely confused as to why Remind, which is a for-profit business, gets to use other companies services free of charge. If Remind were a non-profit I could, maybe, see an argument that they shouldn't incur certain costs but they aren't a non-profit.

I can’t believe the amount of downvotes you are getting. Apparently it’s okay to demand free service from an SMS carrier because.... think of the children? Or what?